This is the joint website of Women Against Rape and Black Women's Rape Action Project. Both organisations are based on self-help and provide support, legal information and advocacy. We campaign for justice and protection for all women and girls, including asylum seekers, who have suffered sexual, domestic and/or racist violence.

WAR was founded in 1976. It has won changes in the law, such as making rape in marriage a crime, set legal precedents and achieved compensation for many women. BWRAP was founded in 1991. It focuses on getting justice for women of colour, bringing out the particular discrimination they face. It has prevented the deportation of many rape survivors. Both organisations are multiracial.

The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority routinely refuses to make awards to women who have committed minor offences

Pauline Doyle was gang-raped as a teenager. After the attack, life slipped increasingly from her control. She was failed by numerous agencies and, for 19 years, was addicted to heroin and crack, supporting her habit in any way she could.

LISA LONGSTAFF from Women Against Rape and CRISTEL AMISS of the Black Women’s Rape Action Project examine the state’s attempts at obfuscation

Far from tackling rape, the government’s response to the review into the child rape epidemic in Oxford is a merely smokescreen to “manage” the outcry.

The government proposes to make it compulsory to report any underage sexual activity as child abuse. But this would increase the power of the state to control children rather than the power of children and their families to get justice.
It also hides child rape, calling it abuse or exploitation instead. And it disconnects child survivors from adult survivors, especially women. And let’s not forget that only 5.7 per cent of recorded rape ends in conviction and that 90 per cent of rapists get away with it.